Groundcover's Crisis

continued

Our article described Beckett's desire to play a less central role in the homeless newspaper she founded. "This translates into distributing responsibility and knowledge among more people, not leaving precipitously," she writes. "At some point my husband and I might relocate but that is at least a couple of years into the future."

Beckett also disputed our statement that former vendor Greg Owens "sold 1,600 papers in a day. He never sold that much in a month! It is possible that he took in $1,600 in a very good month. This has been negatively impacting our vendors as some customers are now thinking they [the vendors] are getting rich from this."

We weren't able to reach Owens, who has left the area, but agree that we must have misunderstood him. Lonnie Baker, who now has Owens' former spot in front of the People's Food Co-op, says his best-ever month was $900. As we noted in the article, most of the paper's two dozen or so regular vendors earn just $75-$200 a month.